


lifeforms

by funkandwag



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-12
Updated: 2013-09-08
Packaged: 2017-12-23 06:38:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/923166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/funkandwag/pseuds/funkandwag
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We are the sisters of the kaiju." Or, how Newt and Stacker deal with the Cult of the Kaiju.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Karloff, in Blue

**Author's Note:**

> This is mainly based off of a conversation a friend of mine and I had about the Cult of Kaiju and its involvement with the characters’ lives (with an assumption being that Newt knew more about the cult than he would’ve let on, because, c’mon, it’s a group of people devoted to kaiju). The timeline’s been messed with a bit, I guessed wildly on some of Newt’s tattoos, and I inflated Coyote Tango’s kill count, but I otherwise tried to be as accurate as possible.
> 
> Thanks to Katie for editing the first part.
> 
> The conversation can be found at eldritchwangs.tumblr.com, under the tag 'the church of kaiju'.

Newt had an icon or two, portraits of the fallen kaiju, painted on driftwood, not with the gold leaf (or the fool’s gold) of the sun, but the blues and greys of the ocean; he was not a religious man, never had the chance (Berliner musicians born under the shadow of The Wall for parents) nor the capacity (if it’s wrong about dinosaurs, what wouldn’t it be wrong about) for it.

He could still recognize beauty, though, no matter how terrible. Had seen it from the start.

_we are the sisters of the kaiju_

He’d only gone in the store to grab a quick bite to eat, while tissue data collated back in his lab (his lab, indisputably), but then there was some monster taken from a movie set in Frisco, that seemed like the right sort of bad-good for a plateau day, when he couldn’t focus on anything for more than a few minutes, when cement flowed through his veins instead of blood.

“Whatcha watchin’?” (Even now, after years of speaking it, the way syncopated English fell off his tongue sent a little thrill of pleasure up his spine, standard English be damned to structured, rigored hell with no elision and no abbreviation.)

The cashier didn’t even look over at him. “The news, genius.”

“Since when did they start showing sci-fi on-” Quick glance at the screen and, shit, that was CGI done right, man, wasn’t even going to be a TV movie, he’d have to go the theater, which would suck, but. “-CNN?”

“They haven’t.” It was more a growl than anything else, like a dog, with which (uptight but grammatically correct) she obviously had a match, intellect-wise; the largest animal to ever exist was the blue whale and one of those babies didn’t come close to what was currently rampaging on-screen. The caloric requirements alone of that animal’s development would drive it to starvation before it could get that large; there just wasn’t enough food for it to survive.

The trailer was just using CNN to give it some veritas, give a little slack to the suspension of disbelief, that’s all.

“...Okay, so, while Orson Welles rolls over in his grave, can you ring me out?” He grabbed some crisps (no, chips, Brits ate crisps), some chips from the wire rack in front of the counter.

(The monster ripped into a building; specks that must have been people fell, or maybe jumped, from what was left.)

“Just take them.”

“...Seriously?” He looked around, for cameras, looked back at the screen, and the movie was still going on, and now the people-specks on the ground were running from the monster, and that was too big a street to just get shut down like that-

His neck prickled. Newt cleared his throat, kept on looking, no commercial break and it had cut to the president, whose trembling voice seemed actually sincere for the first time since he could remember hearing him speak, and the president said: “I advise you all to remain calm. I advise those citizens living on the coast to find shelter-”

And on and on and that monster that came from some childhood daydream was real but how-

Cut back to the monster, where a roar rumbled out of the speakers and down into his ears, settling heavily in his chest.

He stayed until morning, not sleeping, his eyes burning with that familiar focus that meant he had found a new love to poke at and catalogue until there was nothing left worth finding out.

_we open our arms to receive the angels of the ocean_

School started, without attack by the kaiju (which, Jesus fucking Christ on Mary’s bed, they imported that straight from those ridiculous, old-time Japanese flicks with the toy model cities crumpling under the poorly disguised foot of an underpaid extra, but, honestly, anything else would sound too sterile for what they were: the biggest big-ass dinosaurs from the deep). School went on, without attack by the kaiju; any time he could, he’d search for recordings of the kaiju, sometimes called Axe-head (a little too literal), sometimes called Trespasser (a little too dramatic and also, a little too literal), an itch he wouldn’t stop scratching, even if he could. School let out for Christmas break and he went home to the redbrick, where German was spoken and music allowed to ring freely through the halls, with zero regard for the neighbors but there no kaiju attacks as a present.

He had to wait until Valentine’s for that, and, no joke, it was better than a kiss and some dinner, because a kiss and some dinner didn’t lumber like  the best sort of motherfucking nightmare; a kiss and some dinner would have been exciting for a second, maybe for a few hours after depending on how the situation developed, but the kaiju-

The kaiju were electric rods slammed directly into his brain, lighting him up like nothing else.

This one rampaged for more than a week before it was brought down, a week where he spent in a perverse sort of fast: barely ate, barely drank, barely slept, so glued was he to the set by the awesome (old sense and new sense combined into one) beast.

(None of his family said anything; as far as they were concerned he was just in one of his ‘moods’, in quotes that meant ‘Newton’s crazy again, what a surprise, better let him be, useless to talk to him’ when all he wanted to do was talk, though only he would have understood what he was saying.)

More information leaked out, this time: their blood (blue, blue, what did blue blood mean beyond a spurious link with European aristos, what was it made of, couldn’t be that it was deoxygenated) was poison to anything it touched so stay away from it, their shit (full of phosphorus, which meant a protein-heavy diet) was good for farming so get your hands on it, and they came from an interdimensional rift in the Mariana Trench, which made physics a little more appealing, but not enough that Newt would actually pull up stakes and try to switch fields. First of all, physics was too lifeless; second of all, physics would always be too lifeless.

So, he hung around the Math Department and asked them about it, what implications that held, but they gave him jackshit to work with. Nothing he could use to figure out the physiology of the kaiju beyond ‘more alien than could ever be imagined’ and ‘containing earth-shattering revelations for biotechnology’.

But he already knew that; not even a cockroach could survive a dead-on drone strike (they stopped using manned flights after Trespasser), but here was Halimaw, shrugging them off like pebbles, like nothing; it was like seeing Goliath swatting away Judeans or Israelites or whatever biblical name was used at the time, but almost like he was a neutral party (the Romans, maybe), so instead of being afraid, he was fascinated.

“Beautiful,” slipped out of his mouth, once, around some colleagues, all of them huddled around a laptop late at night, as he pointed at Halimaw slamming against a skyscraper.

“Geiszler, what the fuck?” Jeremy Nakamura said this. Bright guy (though, inevitably, not as bright as him), good guy, coarse with the pretty boy looks of a Dashing ScientistTm. “We’re watching the end of the world here, not a Van fucking Gogh.” (British pronunciation on the Gogh; odd, given that he was an American and did not understand that a painting did not involve watching as much as it did staring until you had taken in the proper amount of culture.)

“Jer-”

Jeremy grabbed him by the shirtfront, pulled him close to his face, as he slowly and softly and like to put a chill up his spine said, “Real fucking people, Doctor Geiszler. People with shitty little kids and shitty little jobs and shitty little lives but people, fuckhead, our people are getting slaughtered here and you’re saying it’s beautiful.”

“Jer, I’m calling the fact that it can move that fast slash move at all beautiful. Its bones have to be organic steel for it to support its body mass-”

And so on, but in the wrong way, with the wrong tone, the sort of talking that set people's teeth on edge from get-go; if they agreed, it was bitterly.

A relentless stream of anonymous complaints about shit he’d been doing since he started teaching were thrown his way. Jeremy stopped talking to him, which made it likely he was doing it, though not certain; the other ones there, they didn’t say anything, but they didn’t have to.

Idiots.

The tissue research project had too many backers and theirs? Not enough. His lectures contained no reference to kaiju and were, by far, the most popular; mostly because, holy shit, Professor Geiszler, PhD, was young enough to be a student and, holy shit, he’s fucking crazy, man, you should see some of the shit he pulls.

Newt kept on about kaiju (in a purely scientific way, of course) and the way their bodies must work, what conditions they grow under for them to be so diverse in appearance but still apparently seek to do the same thing; always the enraged hunter, never the cowed hunted, always going to the cities, never to the countryside, et cetera et cetera, basically the same pattern of behavior with each new kaiju, which struck up an itch in his brain.

It was beautiful. They were beautiful, the grandest, cruelest expression of nature since the dinosaurs. The kaiju lumbered; they destroyed cities; they were only brought down by the absolute worst humanity had to offer. They were the first aliens (couldn’t be anything else; if the Breach was a time hole leading to the future and the kaiju were just evolved from whatever physicists could imagine them to be evolved from, the earth they must have come from would have been so different in its makeup that the kaiju might as well have been aliens), the first aliens, and they were doing massive amounts of destruction.

Young Newt’s dino-based scribbles come to life, albeit a bit more realistic in terms of proportions. (No spindle legs supporting a barrel body, and so on.)

_majestic creatures from beyond our horizons, deliver us from suffering and strike the evil from our hearts_

Brawler Yukon: a name for a childish concept made into humanity’s last hope, the first time a kaiju dropped without a nuke dropping too, without the pyrrhic knowledge that yeah, the immediate danger is gone, but say hello to heightened cancer rates and scorched earth, without making a desert and half-heartedly calling it peace; a few years of that and there’d be enough peace that the kaiju wouldn’t have anything left to wreck.

He could (had to, if he was being honest) suppress a grin about Scissure ripping through Sydney. Again, it was like a Roman watching Goliath. Yukon, though, was like watching David, hurling stones at a giant, the underdog beating the top dog. (And, as a bonus, there would be more kaiju left for study. Not that he was anywhere close to getting his hands on a specimen, but the people who did were being very public; wouldn’t too hard to extrapolate from their findings and their reports, sloppy and amateur as they were sure to be.)

The way Karloff’s head snapped back, the way it recoiled, the way its skin (armor, really) cracked, broke, but did not crumble, all of it scientifically interesting, all of it making his head rush from the best monster movie he had ever seen, made better by the fact that it was all real, that this could happen.

It called for a celebration to honor the turning of the tides, the new age. And humanity, blue in the face and faint from its collective held-in breath, obliged, with flair. Everything shut down,

Newt’s skin called for a memorial to a new age in biology, so he slipped away from the party, which was easy enough, given that he didn’t drink (dulled too much) and given that no one there, drinking or not, would have missed him. A different timezone meant it was early morning/late night when it was all over, but the tattoo parlors, the sort that catered to drunks and rebellious rich kids, stayed open twenty-four hours, seven days a week (which had a vaguely blasphemous and certainly capitalistic vibe to it); photo paper copy of a Karloff screenshot in hand, Newt wandered from shop to shop, refused by each one, growing more and more desperate, until he found The One.

The One (hand-painted on a sign in the shape of its eponymous numeral) and appeared to be a prime spot for the breeding of hepatitis A through Z (newfound mutations with the contribution of each customer), tetanus, and a plethora of blood disease.

But the artist (blonde dreadlocks and no name except for the name ‘Maria’ around her wrist in cursive) didn’t turn him away. And that was enough, that was more than enough, but then she started asking him questions (smart ones, even for someone working in a tattoo parlor) and he started answering (simply at first, but more extravagantly, with hypotheses upon hypotheses, things lacking any basis but his gut feeling) and one thing led to another and he didn’t even care if she was shit at her job or if his arm turned black and fell off, because there was finally someone who got it.

(Actually, he wouldn’t care anyway; it wasn’t his dominant arm, so it wouldn’t be too great a loss and maybe he could incorporate it into his research: prove his theories on himself.)

“The gravity, you know, on their home planet must be something else, I mean, obviously, chances are it’s something else, it’s another planet, of course-”

“Hey, man, guess what?”

“What?”

“You’re done.”

Newt looked at it. Karloff was captured well enough, but-

But there was so much blue (Kaiju Blue and sky blue and a blue that only belonged to the ocean) and there was an uncomfortable stiffness to Karloff, like he had been told to pose, and the pose itself reminded him of a book of saints. “What, uh, what did you base this on, I’ve only see stuff like this in-”

“Church?” Okay. Okay, nothing to worry about, she was an artist working in a dump, for fuckssake, of course she would try to emulate a grander sort of tradition, who wouldn’t, don’t worry-

“A museum, with all the old paintings of saints and-” (the word slipped out of his head) “-whatever they were in charge of.”

She smiled revealing teeth filed into points; he almost shuddered, not from the thing itself, but from the idea of the file scraping against the enamel.

“Their patronage.” She wrapped a bandage around his arm.

“...Right.” Newt smiled back, finally; it pulled at his face wrong, but he smiled. Didn’t want to make her suspicious, after all.

They smiled at each other for a little too long (much too long), before she said, “So, anyway, leave the dressing on for a day, soak it in lukewarm water before pulling it off, only wash the tattoo with lukewarm water and none of that floral soap crap, okay, just regular soap, and-” (She grabbed some tubes.) “-put this on it after you wash it. Don’t shave the tattoo, don’t wear tight clothing, don’t treat it like anything but a thousand-year-old goldleaf onionskin manuscript, okay-”

“But you don’t wash manuscripts.” (Stupid.)

Her smiling stopped and, relieved, he followed suit. “Like, dude, like. What I mean is, treat it like a wound that’s scabbing over.”

(He couldn’t stop.) “It is that.”

“...Yeah, I guess, but a special sort of wound you pay for, so treat it better than a wound you don’t.”

(Shut up, shut up, Newt.) “I mean, I sort of make it a policy, to, you know, treat most wounds-”

“It’s three hundred.”

“Right, let me just-” He reached into his right front pocket, found nothing; left front, nothing; right back, nothing; left back? nothing.

Fuck. “Uh.”

“Forgot it?” An expertly cocked eyebrow, bored voice, fuck, double fuck, fuck, the artist knew people who pulled this before, probably thought he was one of them, fuck.

“I work up at MIT, I can just run up-”

“Are you a professor, or something?” Both eyebrows raised, voice still bored, still in shit, because he didn’t want to call his parents about this, didn’t even want to call Gunter; then there’d be some talk about ‘impulsiveness’ and ‘responsibility’ and ‘did you check with a doctor first’ and he could say ‘yes’ to that, actually; he’d checked with himself and he had found it to be a smashing idea.

“Or something. And a professor. Both.”

“They do kaiju studies up there?”

“Not officially. It’s just something I spend my time on.” The smile was back, closed-mouth this time, thank God.

“Hey, you know what? I’ll void it, okay, you just gotta give a little speech-”

“Lecture.” (Where the fuck was it.)

“Lecture for me and my friends. Sound good?”

“Great.” (If it had been stolen.)

“Just about kaiju; no need to go too in-depth, but don’t just be talking about the same shit as the news, okay?”

“Of course.” (Swear to God.)

“Meet me here, then, Friday night. Seven.”

“It’ll have to be eight.” (There was only so many times it could happen.)

Her lips lifted apart; the light glinted off the shininess of her teeth. “No problem. We need people who know their shit.”

Friday night at the tattoo parlor, all dressed up with somewhere to go, somewhere, apparently, not being the shop, but the artist’s (whose name was Kelly, just Kelly, no need for last names, man, they're the System's way of establishing ownership) apartment, seven blocks away, in the middle of a Bostonian summer.

“I mean, thank you, again, for setting me up with this, but why not just tell me where you live?”

Kelly didn’t stop. “The government has eyes everywhere.”

Newt did. “What?”

“What do you mean, what? Do you think they don’t?”

“What I mean is, why would they be focused on us?”

This time, she did stop. “We’re at war, doc, and we’re showing a little too much sympathy-”

“Interest.”

“...Interest, in the enemy.”

“That makes no sense, all right; it’s not like we can switch sides, right?”

Kelly started up again, but said nothing. The rest of the walk was weighed down by a thick silence, the screams of children an uncomfortable counterpoint.

 

The lecture went well, all things considered; better than his lectures usually went, actually. An attentive audience, eyes entirely focused on him, instead of skittering off to whatever it was other people his age did on the computer. (That they did exactly what he did was unlikely, as, again, he just searched for kaiju and, when he found nothing new, coded a bit, if there were no other projects, but there was always another project.)

Perhaps it was a matter of proximity; the number of people crammed in the room (like a monk’s cell) must have violated at least one building code. Perhaps it was a class thing; they all seemed tired as hell. Some looked unwashed, others shabby, and none of them would have fit too well into a ‘classroom setting’.

It was weird, seeing people like this, listening like this to the things he was saying; cleaners and burger flippers had more time for his ideas than Jeremy fucking Nakamura did.

“-maybe arising as a result of development in a low-gravity environment.”

(Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kelly, off to the side, flapping her hand. Hell, he could feel the air she moved.)

“Excuse me, sir-” An older man in a suit gone shiny at the elbows slowly stood up. “Excuse me, but where do you think they came from?”

 

“Like I said, a low-gravity environment, probably with an air composition similar to ours-”

“But where?”

“Couldn’t say, exactly. I mean, no one-”

Kelly grabbed his shoulder, thumb twisting right into the raw skin of his tattoo. “Our next speaker, brother, can tell us that.”

He meant to say something witty and cutting that would , but all that came out was, “Next speaker?”

“Doc, you’re not the only one with things worth saying. Probably be worth it to stay, though.” The thumb twisted harder, the hand it was attached to dragged him to the side, allowing another older man, also in a suit, to step through. This one wasn’t worn out; he was all edges, down to the perfectly ironed pleat in his suit pants.

It almost made Newt embarrassed to be wearing a t-shirt (an old one from his band days, the cotton so thin it might as well have been gossamer) and jeans.

Almost, until the man opened his mouth and let spew the most unconvincing line of bullshit he had ever heard in his life: “To answer your question, brother, first, I must tell you: heaven is not a celestial sphere entirely separate from us, but in the ocean, from where the kaiju come; for the kaiju are not the harbingers of our doom, but the prophets of our redemption. So, brother, to answer your question, the kaiju are from heaven.”

Unscientific to the extreme and-

The room broke out into applause and shouts of ‘amen’.

“Brothers and sisters, you have listened to this, this good doctor-” He grabbed Newt by his other shoulder and squeezed. “-this teacher, this catechist, tell you how strong the kaiju are, how fast, how superbly adapted, how superbly driven they are for the destruction of humanity and, brothers and sisters, I do not think this is a mistake. I do not think they are mere accidents, developed by the careless hand of nature and I think you agree with me, for how else, but by the hand of an intelligent creator?”

“Excuse me-” Both hands dug in deeper. “Excuse me, but-”

“Doctor Geiszler, please. The evidence you’ve given us is enough for faith to grow; too much, and it will be drowned. In any case-”

The man let go and slapped him on the back; an actual slap that forced him forward and would’ve knocked him down, had Kelly not begun to frogmarch him towards the door, tearing up a little from the stench of the man’s bullshit (and, to an incredibly negligible degree, the pain.)

She handed him his wallet back, outside. “You must have dropped it, back in the shop.”

(He could taste a bitter sort of fear boiling its way up out of his stomach.)

“...Yeah. That’s it. That’s me, absentminded professor. Yup.”

Kelly’s eyes raked over his face for a good minute (looking for what) and the fear made a valiant effort at climbing out of his mouth in the form of a scream, but before it could, she said softly, almost so it couldn’t be heard, “No need to worry, okay? All the money’s still in there.” She paused. “...Worse ways to spend your time, y’know?”

With that, the fear got replaced by the famed Geiszler Indignation; a family inheritance that had served him well, in the sense that it had only ever gotten him lightly beaten. “Maybe if the alternative was listening to the rest of his speech or, uh, trying to point out all the logical flaws in his arguments for the mere idea that the kaiju are here to save us-”

Kelly waved her hand dismissively. “They’re here, man. They’re here to stay.”

“That’s what the Jaegers are for.”

She arched an eyebrow. (What a skilled face!) “Hey, man plans and God laughs.”

Newt snorted. “Is it aphorism hour, now? Okay, okay, what about ‘All religions have been made by men’? ‘All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few’? Whatever your angle is-”

“No angle.” She shook her head, so slow it was like a joking sort of disappointed. “You know what your problems is, man? You think they’re au naturale, right, when there’s no fuckin’ way they could’ve developed and-”

“But-”

“And you fuckin’ know it, man, you know it, but you keep dancing around it, because  it offends some theory you already have.” (He had the faintest wisps of a theory.)

“I’m not saying the kaiju couldn’t have been created, I’m saying they aren’t-”

“Shut up, man. Just shut the fuck up. You don’t get it. You think some giant robots are gonna save us from forces of fucking nature-”

“Thought you said they were unnatural.”

“...You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, you mean that you’re basing a cult off of too much Lovecraft and-” (It hurt him to say this.) “-somewhat unconfirmed data.”

“Have you ever seen one up close?”

“No, I-”

“I have, man; you don’t really get how immense, how godlike they are, until you can feel the vibrations from their feet rumbling under yours, until you see them wipe away what you thought you loved, until they leave you a clean slate. They’re our redeemers, doc.”

There was a joke he could have made, a sarcastic, cruel joke, about trauma and delusion, but it died on his lips, because of tremor in her voice and the fire in her eyes. They stood there a few minutes more, as Kelly’s face grew wet and as he stared at the shadow of the new moon.

“...I guess I’ll add that to my list, then.”

“Guess you will.”

She turned to go, had the door open. “Kelly.”

“Yeah?”

“Good luck.”

“Save it for yourself; God’s not here for you, humans aren’t here for you. Only you’re here for you and that’s a step away from the grave.”

She went inside, leaving him to his thoughts and a man who stood across the street, waiting at the bus stop.

 


	2. Yochu, in White

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stacker's dealings with the Cult of Kaiju.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is unedited and probably the last I'll post for a while due to schoolwork; I didn't want to leave you guys hanging, though. This is not entirely canon-compliant, but, again, this is unedited.

_you are mercenaries on a mission of mercy, come to free humanity from a poisoned home. with almighty powers, you stir our ocean and steal our skies._

It was their first mission and- _the spurs have finally scored and dad’s gap is the ebonybetween the ivory of his teeth and for once his hand does not reach to cover it and a posh voice floating out of the speakers late at night and dad’s late again the ocean shyly laps at my knees while luna’s hand brushes against mine -_

Tendo Choi on the comm: “Tacit Ronin will be there in a moment; think you can handle it until then?”

Tamsin answered, “Yes.”

Each step he took sent chills up his bones, making the marrow shiver; it was worse than any training drill, deeper than any hurt there had been before. Each step he took, Tamsin took, and each step they took, Tango did, too; a sort of fluidity was in each movement, and it was like looking at himself from the outside, and it was like looking through her eyes, and together, they looked through Tango’s.

The simulators hadn’t captured this, this pain and this glory and-

“Mind sharp, Stacks.”

“Can’t help it, Tam; you’re leakin’ in.” (Christ, what an uncomfortable thought.)

“What do you expect me to do about it?”

“Read less poetry; maybe it’ll make things a bit less flowery.”

And silence again, except for their thoughts and their memories that bounced back and forth back and forth under the stream of information flowing from Tango into their brains, as they marched, sharp pains like knives already forcing their way into their knees, as they looked for the kaiju codenamed Yochu.

They shouldn’t have had to look too hard, but maybe LOCCENT had-

Even distorted through the speakers, the kaiju’s roars set something deep within his brain to trembling; some holdover from when man was somewhere approaching the bottom of the food chain, some holdover quickly stomped by Tango’s next thunderous step, a turn towards the beast.

“There she is.”

“ _It_.” No need to give them any more than that. Already had people trying to figure out their motivations, their reason to be, when, at best, they were just wild fucking animals. At worst, (and he was not a religious man which eliminated some possibilities) they were deliberately sent by someone or something. Actually, no, that would be better, because then, at least there’d be a way to end it.

“ _It_ is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”

A bright (shining from within, must glow in the dark), white, slick-looking thing, with too many legs and too much body and-

“Don’t like the looks of those teeth.”

Rows upon rows of them, like a shark, except no shark’s mouth had ever extended like it was currently doing; distended and gaping, Yochu daintily picked its way over, its body slamming indiscriminately into buildings.

Still not a problem.

“Tango, be advised that a sizable mob is approaching at your eleven. They are currently-”

Tamsin cut in: “Why aren’t they in a shelter?”

Stacker glanced over at her, brow furrowed;  protocol was to let mission control relay information, then questions, if relevant to the mission. (But, _why aren’t they in a shelter_ , Stacks? What could’ve possessed them to wander in the streets when a Category Two was running rampant? Stacks, _why aren’t they safe_?)

“The shelters may be full or they’re maybe doin’ this on purpose; given their getups, though,  I’d bet the farm on ‘on purpose’.”

It didn’t make any sense. Again, she was the one who spoke: “Are you fucking kidding right now, Choi?”

“No, ma’am; right now, you got a nasty infestation of kaiju cultists.”

“You can’t be serious.” Him, now; how could anyone be so stupid as to fall at the feet of the thing that’d kill them as soon as it saw them. It was traitorous, it was suicidal, it was weak. Pure bloody (bloodless, really) weakness, to give in to such an enemy; there couldn’t be a question of right or wrong, there could only be the action to survive or die. Weakness, pure weakness.

Couldn’t keep thinking about it; Tango had work to do.

“As a heart attack, Stack.” He winced.

“Any suggestions?” The lives of the many outweighed the lives of the few; simple arithmetic. So, _suggestions_ ; not guidelines, not orders, but something he (they) could ignore if necessary.

“Try not to step on them? Shit, man, I don't know what to tell you; the intel we've got is slim pickings all around." Not for the last time, Stacker recognized an embarrassing lack of respect for military protocol in the PPDC.

"All right, Mr. Choi. We’ll try.”

Tamsin turned off the comm. “Yeah, Mr. Choi, we’ll try, but no guarantee we won’t accidentally kill all of them, given the fact that we’re in a giant fucking robot suit.”

“Tam.”

She growled, in a fair imitation of him, “ _Tam_.”

“You know he’s still listenin’ in.”

“But what sort of advice is that, I ask you. You’d think they’d have figured something out by now.”

“Well, I’m sure some nice young men in nice white coats’ll be round in a bit to pick them up.”

“That’s not the point-”

A projectile made contact with Tango’s hull and exploded, but, due to its unprofessional make, did almost nothing except make a pathetic little bang, and, perhaps more significantly, draw Yochu’s attention.

Tam slammed her hand against the comm and said, “Choi, I do believe your little cultists just tried to christen our maiden voyage.”

“Yeah, that champagne bottle picked up on our scanners.”

Yochu began to tiptoe over. “And here’s the priest to finish off the ceremony.”

Stacker cut in: “Let’s aim mortars for the body; don’t want to get too close, don’t know what else it’s got going on in its gob.”

(The cultists threw another ‘champagne bottle’. Again, it did nothing.)

Tango took aim, fired.

  
  


Yochu  went down easy. Didn’t even need Tacit Ronin and Kaori complained about it later, like it was a bad thing.

(‘Ronin’ suited them.)

No, what was hard about it were the cultists.The field reports later would state that cultists did not run; they did not run as the ground cracked beneath its weight, they did not run as the buildings crumbled down around their heads, they did not run. They did not run and they died beneath the feet of their god, an uncaring beast, in a bloody, wasteful act that didn’t even really count as martyrdom, because they hadn’t died for Yochu; it had killed them.

 

_o kaiju kings, lead us down into your paradise below the seas and vanquish all who oppose your supreme reign._

[An excerpt from 11/01/17 interview of Hannibal Chau, conducted by Marshall Stacker Pentecost]

“Mr. Chau, I am-”

“Wasting my time.”

“Am I? Because this is a matter of international security; any interviews conducted for the the preservation of that aren’t, by _definition_ , a waste of time.” [Lack of introduction is legally problematic but as Chau is on the wrong side of the law, it’s excusable.]

“I don’t see what my occupation has to do with international security.”

“No, but your position within your ‘occupation’ does.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Let’s not play around here, Mr. Chau. We know you carve up kaiju for a living, we know your weight and height and blood type, we know where you live, we know where you’re from, we even know your _birth name_ and, if it came right down to it, we could throw you a birthday party. Mr. Chau, we know you. And we also know who you’ve been sellin’ to.” [Records show that we only have his physical information on file; personal information is as of yet unknown.]

“That’s my business.”

“As I’ve said before, your business is our business. And part of your business is sellin’ to people who’d be _happy_ to see you snapped up by one of your kaiju.”

“Look, I just know that they buy, not what they do with it.”

“But you can guess.”

“...Yeah.”

“Good. I have here a record of your transactions for the past six months, edited to only show sales made to believed members. _Sit down_ , a ship as large as yours’s bound to have a few leaks. And, let me tell you, I expected the talons and the claws - Catholics have their slivers from Christ’s cross, makes sense. But, what are headchangers?”

“Hallucinogens.”

"Ah. Do they cause any specific sort of hallucinations or..."

"Depends on what's goin’ on in the user's head _but_ since we're talkin’ about cultists, we're definitely talking about kaiju."

"I see. Is there ever an uptick in purchases of them?”

“How do you mean?”

“Before an attack, for example.”

“You got your data right there, don’t you?”

“What I’m askin’ is if you’ve noticed it.”

“I don’t know, sir, I’m not breathin’ down my vendors’ necks.”

“[Pentecost’s voice too low for recorders to pick up; video show he was whispering to Chau until he grabbed Chau by his collar and said] -save you from the pit we’ll stick you in.”

“...Kinda funny how we always get a surge of buyers just before we get a new supply in.”

“Is it safe?”

“Safe enough.”

[Excerpt ends; further questioning was both inconclusive and unproductive.]

 

_look how you crucify our false prophets, man-made tyrants who fear what they do not understand. you are not the scourge. you are the salvation._

But before that, Stacker and Tamsin walked onto the factory floor, suited up like they were going in the Pod; each click of their boots against the concrete drew more and more eyes to them, the famed pilots of Coyote Tango, the saviors of Tokyo, the slayers of Onibaba. And he, Stacker Pentecost, the only pilot to go it alone. Heroes, in the modern sense of the word.

(Heroes, in the ancient sense of the word, too, because what went unreported was that her flesh body was destroying itself from its long sojourn in the metal one and that it was a bloody miracle that he wasn’t a human vegetable shitting in a bedpan; things like that generally went unreported, due to their ‘detrimental effect on the war effort’ - fancy talk for ‘we don’t want people to think too hard about what you’ve given up, because then we’d have to pay you more’. Their fatal flaws, ripping them apart from the inside out.)

A woman was speaking, her back to them; she wasn’t really one of the workers, you could tell. Job she had, shouldn’t have have been so much fire in her. (Not that munitions was bad work, just hard and boring and nothing really to show for it at the end of the day; it wore you down, until it was enough to have rations and a roof over your head.)

“You gotta ask, man, what’s the fuckin’ point? We keep pourin’ money into the program, our money, we keep starvin’ to feed the PPDC, and our kids are starvin’ too, look at them, they’re too goddamn scrawny and if we could get a doctor out here, they’d tell us they’re malnourished as shit. There’s no point to this, to any of this,”

She was met with silence, so she laughed a bit, low and harsh and bitter like a sea witch would. She went on: “You’re all chickenshit, you know that? You’re all too chickenshit to say it, but you know it’s fuckin’ true. This whole war is us fighting nature and nature never fuckin’ loses. She always gets her way.”

Stacker said something first, because he could almost hear the hot words about to come boiling out of Tamsin’s mouth and this was a ‘surprise drop-in visit’ meant to boost morale; plus, there was the danger her voice

“Nature isn’t somethin’ apart from us, we’re livin’ in it every second of the day. Adapt or die, that’s nature. And, that’s what the Jaeger Program is: us adaptin’ to the fact that two-ton beasts are trying to wipe us out of existence. What’s unnatural is givin’ in to fear and bucklin’ under its weight.”

The woman turned; pinpricks and holes in her face where metal would go after her shift was over and a face set in a stony, gimlet-eyed glare that tried to boring holes through his skull. But he was a ranger, and before that, the sort of kid that shopkeepers followed around and the sort of kid that needed two years of saintly behavior before teachers thought him human. She was nothing, compared to them.

“...Sir, a coyote caught in a trap will gnaw its leg off to get free; usually, they bleed out. And if they don’t, and they get through all that bone and gristle, they’re still missing a fuckin’ leg, they’re easy pickings for the next coyote or bear or whatever the fuck else that comes along. We can struggle all we want, but even if we beat the fuckin’ kaiju, what’s next? What happens when someone gets greedy and starts thinkin’ about what he can do with his shiny new toys?”

(Security started to brush past him and the stone cracked into something more feral.)

Tam broke in, voice raspy and thin: “Maybe, maybe not. Either way, can’t know that unless we actually try.”

The woman rushed towards them, a wrench (grabbed from a bench) in hand and Stacker stepped in front of Tamsin (she cursed him for that: ‘Bloody stupid chivalry.’). But, before she could get too close, security had shot her.

And throughout the rest of it - the screaming (one man starting up the clarion call), the rush away towards the door - Coyote Tango’s crew stood stockstill, barely breathing as they watched the blood leak out of the woman’s body.

Nothing could be done for her; she was already dead, arms cast about, the name ‘Maria’ wrapped around one wrist. Nothing could be done for her,  _could_ have been done for her; she'd been lost a long time ago, drunk on the blue blood of the kaiju.


	3. Pentecost, in Navy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Newt and Stacker meet for the first time.

_we fall to our knees in your infinite shadow and raise our hands in awe and admiration._

You had to be careful around the marshal. Couldn’t let out a single word of dissent (except from his daughter, but she was a prodigy and she did it once in a blue fucking moon and so subtly, you couldn’t even tell usually), a single sigh, let a solitary flicker of what could have been disagreement with him (and what could have been disagreement with the godawful rations) cross your face. It was part of the job, of course; if he let there be a _discussion_ , he might as well have crippled the program. But, he always took it a little too far, a little too seriously.

So there was that to worry about.

And then, there was this, this thing you wouldn’t figure out for months,as it wouldn’t really come up, but if the marshal heard you talking about it, you dropped whatever you’re doing because you were going to get shaken down like a kid for lunch money. _This_ was, of course, the little kaiju cults that started popping up after the attacks started, the same ones that tried sabotaging the jaegers for a while, before security tightened up and before we started winning.

He had a sixth sense about it; you could just be showing some of the weird-ass propaganda/religious leaflets you found stuffed in your car door and he’d be _there_ , almost close enough to touch, asking you _where_ and _when_ and _how_ , asking _who do you think_ and _what do you think_. And you had to be careful, answering those questions; you didn’t know what’d get you fired or suspended or ‘officially reprimanded’, so you played dumb like your life depended on it. If he thought you were dumb, you’d maybe get knocked down a pay grade, but if he thought you smart and knew more than you should about the cult, well, somebody’d started following you, stuff started getting moved around on your desk, in your bedroom, wherever.

Everyone played dumb during a Stack Attack, unless they were too green to know any better or, if you were Doctor Geiszler, a Kaiju Groupie Who Did Not Know When to Shut the Fuck Up.

Geiszler was another guy you had to careful around, but for a whole different set of reasons: if Stacker was an interrogator, Geiszler was the sort of guy who got interrogated. He had kaiju ink up and down his arms and at least (according to three medical reports and some peeking in the shower ‘on accident’) a full-torso one of Onibaba. He knew their weights, could guess their category based off a single glance (which was something he and Choi always argued over), had encyclopedic knowledge of each one; he was a groupie, almost a fanatic.

Knew about the cults, too, which is how he drew the marshal’s eye. Or maybe he had already had it from the moment Geiszler had first stepped out of the recruiting station, after a physical had revealed nearsightedness, an allergy to penicillin, and more kaiju ink than was healthy. Not just because of liver damage, but because of the fact that his tattoos probably got his ass beat (or nearly did) on a weekly basis.

The marshal and Geiszler were set on a collision course; the only question was _when_.

 _When_ was about two weeks after the kaiju groupie (Gottlieb’s the only one who can do that justice; got that German roughness scratching around in the back of his throat) washed up at the Alaska Shatterdome. _When_ was about five seconds after he started rattling off branches of the cult like colors. _When_ was one beat after ‘The Brackish Order of the Lords of the Breach’ had tumbled its way out of his mouth.

What happened was that the marshal put his hand on Geiszler’s shoulder. That may not sound like a big deal, but, in addition to the kaiju thing and the tightassness thing, he had a touching thing. ( _Shut up_ , man, I didn’t mean it like that.) If you just brushed up against him, on accident, completely on accident, didn’t mean to, there’s no bet on, promise, but if you brushed up against him, it was like touching a hot stove. He didn’t make a big deal about it; didn’t have to, because he’d get this look on his face, made you just about shit yourself, like shooting flares at a kaiju.

So, him touching Geiszler was out of the fucking blue, completely unexpected, and totally suspect; I thought (I was there, swear to God) he was gonna do a Vulcan neck pinch or some shit.

But he just put his hand on his shoulder and Geiszler, who must have still possessed some vestiges of a survival instinct, tried to jump the fuck away. ‘Tried’ being the key word here because when the marshal wanted to hold you, he _held_ you. So, Geiszler just sort of hunched up a bit, curling forward from the marshal.

“Doctor-” (but he said it like you’d say ‘hey cocksucker’, y’know, but to someone you’re not friends with) “-Doctor, where did you learn all this?” He said this all careful, like Geiszler was a stray he didn’t want to scare off, yet.

“Documentary.” It came out his mouth too fast, so you knew he was lying.

“What was it called?”

“Uh, can’t recall its title _exactly_ , but I probably have the disc somewhere-”

And then, to make it worse, _he grabbed dude by his other shoulder and just spun him the fuck around_. Like, bad enough to have that man (that fucking icon) behind you, asking you questions about the nefarious shit you know you shouldn’t know even know about, let alone have a list of its names stored in the manic mess you call a brain; but then he turns you to look him in the face, and there’s only an inch of space and you’d be breathing the same air if you were fucking breathing, but you aren’t, because his eyes are, like, probing into your fucking _soul_ and scraping up all the nasty shit and examining it in front of God and your mom and everybody you respect and everyone you hate and everybody else so they can see who you really are and who you really are isn’t something you anyone to know about, including yourself. And then he says, “Not good enough, Newt.”

If I was Geiszler, I would’ve shit myself. But Geiszler is Geiszler and what Geiszler did is say: “There are documentaries, plural.”

And it was like barging into the confessional when the priest was already in there with somebody and that somebody was telling the priest a something that the church had some penance for, if the penitent was actually penitent; we all knew that Geiszler wasn’t and I had to keep working with him (if the marshal let him stay on), so I walked away.

           Guess Geiszler couldn't've have fucked up too bad, ‘cause we all know where they ended up: the marshal’s a martyr atomized at the bottom of the sea and Geiszler’s a research subject for the long-term effects of Drifting and a freak of nature that mindmelded with an eldritch fucking being.

_let the blue blood of the archangels wash away our iniquity that we may start life anew in the world before…_

“There are documentaries, plural.” Newton Fermi Geiszler, Ph.D (a half dozen times over), has myopia, several tattoos in various styles depicting kaiju, and a light splatter of freckles across the bridge of his nose that will get lighter and lighter until they fade away under the dim northern sun and the bright lab fluorescents; Tamsin had freckles like that.

“Make a list of them and submit it to Mr. Choi; they’ll be reviewed for intelligence purposes-”

“Don’t waste your time, okay, they’re all really sensationalistic. Heavy on the sting music and rhetorical questions, light on any actual information.”

“And where do you get actual information?”

“Have the right sort of tattoos, write the right sort of papers, express the right sort of enthusiasm - basically, just make them think you’re one of them. You’ll get invited to a meeting and be asked to speak to a group of fellow kaiju enthusiasts. Then it’ll turn out to be a cult and that’s not your brand of obsessive, so you’ll get the fuck out of there, but hey, lucky you, you were followed, so now instead of one government watchlist, you’re on, like, ten.”

The number was closer to five; it’s been pared down to one, presided over by the Intelligence Division of the PPDC.

“So you might as well dig because you’re already fucked and as it turns out they aren’t, like, an actual organization like the Catholic Church or something, so they don’t know you essentially told their Jeanne d’Arc to go fuck herself. They just see the ink and think that you’re cool, so you get a little deep with them-”

He stops. “I mean, I don’t believe in any of their tenets, you know, I just don’t have the capacity for it.”

Stacker smiles. “But it’s interestin’ to you, so you just dig at it, like you dug at tissue replication and like you’ve been diggin’ at kaiju since they showed up.”

A look of surprise. Always a look of surprise, like people didn’t always just lay themselves out for you like an open book, like he wasn’t authorized to look over their files and figure it out from there. “...Yeah. So you get a little...Okay, so short version: they just think I’m like them and I pretend I’m like them and I get food discounts and neat artwork and I get access to organs I otherwise wouldn’t because I guess they have larger budget than we do.”

“They don’t; we just choose to spend it on Jaegers instead of distended kaiju anuses.”

He doesn’t laugh at first; they never do. After they realize Marshal Stacker Pentecost’s made a joke, they might chuckle a little, out of obligation, or stay silent, as the moment for laughter has already passed.

Geiszler snorts. “That wouldn’t be the worst shit they get up to.” Beat. “Or in to.” He grins and Stacker takes his hands away.

“I’m sure.”

For a few seconds, they just look at each other, in the buzzing, not-silent silence found only in places that never slept: cities, forests, Shatterdomes. Of course, Geiszler’s the one to break it. The man couldn’t keep quiet if he wanted to and he never did; keeping quiet meant hiding his much-flaunted genius meant smothering

“So-”

“If you find out anythin’ relevant, come straight to me. Otherwise, I’m not interested in your extracurricular activities.”

“No, no, it’s not about that, okay, it’s about that one math guy you have, Gottlieb or whatever; he’s seriously-”

Hands up, palms out: a gesture of defeat or a gesture of warding off.

“Not interested in office politics, either.”

“Just hear me out-”

“No, sorry, _good-bye_ , Doctor Geiszler.”

The marshal exits stage left, leaving the mad scientist behind. End of story, except that, after the war turns bad, when all the others start leaving, he doesn’t and neither does he.

And in the end, that was enough.


End file.
